Directed by Kerry Griffin. At the Second City Theatre, 51 Mercer St. 416-343-0011 or secondcity.com

One of the great things about Second City is that they keep on stretching the boundaries of comedy and you can never tell what a given show is going to offer you.

Their latest entry, We Can Be Heroes, now playing in their Mercer St. digs, is one of their most adventurous yet. And at its best, it dispenses enough sheer comic genius and theatrical invention to make any patron happy.

Is it perfect? No. Some scenes just don’t click, while others go on too long. But Second City shows are always works in progress and by the time you attend (which you definitely should), these problems might very well be gone.

Let’s cheer all the good stuff first, which starts with Kerry Griffin’s direction of the piece. This is probably the most choreographed Second City show I’ve ever seen. You want dance? You’ve got it! And Griffin and his skilled cast make every kind of modern movement hilarious, from skanky club moves to “sensitive” ice dancing. Brilliant.

There’s a fair bit of original music too (thank, Matthew Reid!), including a grabber of an opening number where the loveably rubber-faced, leather-lunged Jan Caruana lets loose with a song about everything disturbing in our city, rhyming “People who are multitasking” with “Policemen who shoot without asking.” Bulls-eye, and that’s 45 seconds into the show.

You’re going to love Allison Price, too, an iced venti americano of a performer whose long, cool appearance conceals the kick underneath. One moment, she’s a goggle-eyed loser on Queen St. W., singing plaintively about whether the scruffy types she’s attracted to are “hipster or homeless.”

Then she’s the perkiest office girl you’ve ever met, who finally turns on her negative colleague and declares, “If you want to say f--- you to the world, that’s fine, but don’t be surprised when the world says f--- you right back.”

Connor Thompson is a welcome newcomer to the mainstage, another chameleon who can play the fuzzy young Tom Hanks card at will, but can also break into amazingly surreal characters like his blind lifeguard (a politically incorrect but side-splitting sequence) or a sex-crazed bisexual bat in a summer cottage, who contrives to have his way with both the husband and wife who discover him.

There’s a lot of wonderfully dweeby humour from Craig Brown, who excels at playing the last one in the room to get the joke, but comes into his own in an extended mime sequence about facing despair because of a receding hairline. I know, I know, “mime” is my least favourite four-letter word in the language as well, but Brown and company make it work.

Kevin Vidal is a coiled bedspring of energy throughout, hilarious as the black student everyone keeps trying to hide on the dance floor at a Deep South prom and capable of a killer change-up, when a seemingly maudlin ode to a bed partner gets a delicious kick at the last moment.

And please, please, please, don’t forget Stacey McGunnigle, who often plays the abrasive urban hottie to perfection, but slays us all with a sketch as the most clueless member of Ford Nation you’ve ever seen, telling a pair of Olivia Chow pollsters that she hates events like Nuit Blanche, because she keeps seeing people eating corn on a stick and can’t figure out where they got it.

Favourite sketch? No doubt about it. Price and Vidal as a pair of Canadian Olympic ice dancers debating if they should pull out of the Winter Games because of Russia’s homophobia. It’s truly droll and deadly accurate, before finally moving into a musical number that will have you on the floor with laughter.

What doesn’t work? The sticky hand of sentimentality intrudes a bit too often, including a long sketch between Vidal and Caruana as the saintly old man who befriends an obnoxious kid. Its themes come back in another scene near the show’s end, which is so obviously a tug at your heartstrings that, if you’re like me, you may find they stay firmly tied up.

And other sketches have funny ideas, but not a lot of funny lines. Once upon a time, verbal wit was a big part of the Second City mix. It’s not here as much as it should be and its presence is missed.

But those are truly minor flaws. We Can Be Heroes is sharp, stylish and satiric. It’s also very funny, which is why we go to Second City, right?

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